The present invention relates generally to pattern recognition and, more particularly, to enabling a content-based search of objects, such as faces, in an image database with reduced matching.
Identifying a person by his face is one of the most fundamental and seemingly effortless human activities. To impart this capability to a machine has generated a lot of interest in the field of automated face recognition, and a number of implementation approaches have been proposed. Application of such a machine has a broad utility range, varying from photo identification for personal identification, credit card verification, and criminal identification to real time matching of video images in different constraints in terms of processing requirements.
However, present systems require use of a significant amount of features for analysis and the computational requirements of these systems are very high. Thus, significant computer resources are required, and identification is slow and sometimes incorrect, leading to false identification. Thus, there is a continuing need for better ways to be able to search for an image of an object in an image database, such as faces, in a content-based search with reduced matching.